Jaime Lopez: Designing to the Edge in Cancer Care
Jaime Lopez, VP, Brand & Product Design, Flatiron Health. Images courtesy of Jaime Lopez
At her most recent jobs, Jaime Lopez has tackled two monumental challenges—climate change and cancer. As Flatiron Health’s VP, Brand and Product Design, she leads a team that solves for the tech burden of cancer care. Much of the available clinical data is unstructured and stored across thousands of disconnected local clinics, medical centers and hospitals. Flatiron Health connects community oncologists, academics, hospitals, life science researchers and regulators on a shared digital platform.
Designing for cancer care is complex. It’s personal, heartbreaking, and full of opportunity. Lopez shares how her team brings a product-forward mentality to patient records, how they build products so medical providers can prescribe treatment from anywhere (including during dinner), and why the healthcare industry is ripe for cutting-edge design.
What led you to join Flatiron Health?
My wife and I got recruited together. Her mom had passed away from cancer two years before that and one of my biggest concerns was that we were going to talk about cancer 24/7. I wondered, Can we do that?
After joining, we saw it’s not a sad place. It’s this place where you're hyper-focused on opportunity. It feels like the opposite of grieving in this powerful way. Of course, it's hard. I've had colleagues pass away from cancer. Many of us are there for personal reasons.
“We’re exploring how far we can push innovation in research, clinical trials and the regulatory space—where breaking things really isn’t an option.”
When you arrived, where did you start and what did you see?
You start by shadowing one of our oncologists in a clinic. You learn quickly that electronic health records were not built with this product-forward mentality. They were built to respond to almost a gold rush of regulatory demands, so a bunch of software was generated. There are tons of rules and regulations to follow, and I'm so impressed with how the designers on my team navigate those constraints.
The tech burden for oncologists, nurses, and admins is huge. We design to reduce their product as much as we can, as fast as we can, without breaking their stuff. One of the design principles at Flatiron is that “five seconds matters.” Because what our users are doing, they're doing 200 to 300 times a day. That one thing quickly becomes exponential.
How do you solve for that?
An oncologist might look at a huge dashboard full of information. As a designer, we know that can be really fatiguing and overwhelming to do all day long. It’s the safe thing, because we’re going to show you everything. But, and you can’t get mad at us, we’ve created an option that edits out six of those columns that we believe aren't as important. But it’s up to you. You're the doctor.
We just created a mobile app for oncologists, and we reduced the information in there down to the bare minimum of what they need. We have had so many oncologists that tell us they get calls from patients while they are at dinner. So we need to design for oncologists treating patients from their phones. There is tons of data in the patient chart they can’t see. But we believe that we can curate their experience to the most critical workflows and that will not provide any risk to the patient or to their care.
What's the biggest bet you've made lately?
We’re exploring how far we can push innovation in research, clinical trials and the regulatory space—where breaking things really isn’t an option. How much of a role can machine learning play? What kind of tools or interfaces can we build that would meaningfully improve the speed and efficacy of research? We have designers, scientists, engineers all collaborating on how to make research better, faster, more modern. And this is really what’s at the center of our mission: How can we learn from the experience of cancer patients and give back?
How do you design for human emotion and cancer?
That’s where the brand work (video above) has come in. The primary element we’ve built in our brand is that we’re “proof first.” We do not make marketing claims about what we're doing. We don't say we're going to cure cancer. We don't even really say that we're going to fight cancer. We tell you the things that we think we can do to help you.
The worst thing you could do is overpromise on where we are with cancer care today. We can talk about our ambitions, and we should do that. But it's always rooted in medical publications and research papers.
What was your biggest concern about joining a healthcare company?
My biggest concern was if I was going to be able to do high quality creative work. What happens when you're working in community oncology?
How did you approach that concern?
Before I signed on, I told the company I needed to know that we will have the support to do good design work. That has to be part of the deal. We'll need to be able to hire a team. And you also have to trust me to lead you through a rebrand—I had to very quickly show them what that means. Within the first six months, we radically shifted the way we do a lot of our visual design and embarked on a rebrand.
What would you say to those who want to do impactful work, but might not think of healthcare as the first industry they want to work in?
We’ve barely scratched the surface on what we can do within both product and brand design. Healthcare is still not seen as the place you go to look for the most cutting-edge design choices. There’s an opportunity to change that.
In order to do more of that, we need to share more of our thinking. We need to go back to the design community and say: Here’s how you work in cancer. Here's how you shadow a cancer patient throughout their day. Here’s what you look for when you shadow an oncologist. And here’s how we can be ambitious and design to change things.
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